China's Villages / China's Sustainable Future

Schedule Photo Exhibition Speakers Directions Flier

April 14- 15 , 2008 Room 230 UK Student Center

All events are free and open to the public

This symposium focuses on a recently completed European Union sponsored, four year research project in China, which was directed by Oikodrom: the Vienna Institute of Urban Sustainability and included faculty from UK's Center for Sustainable Cities. The project called “SUCCESS” (Sustainable Users Concepts for China Engaging Scientific Scenarios) studied seven rural agricultural villages in six different Chinese provinces in terms of their present ways of life and their sustainable prospects for the future. The featured speaker will be Dr. Heidi Dumreicher, the director of Oikodrom who directed the SUCCESS project.

The million rural Chinese villages are living under multiple pressures from without and within, that threaten their very survival. Economic influences as well as current Chinese national policy are having the consequence of forcing a mass migration of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants to new, massively unsustainable industrial towns. The SUCCESS project was intended to offer a sustainable alternative, building upon the development of civil society processes, appropriate technologies and traditional Chinese cultural strengths. The SUCCESS project views the way of life of these villages as being “protosustainable” (at least from a resource and environmental perspective,) living in a largely self-sufficient way as their ancestors did, from local resources and exporting few harmful imbalances beyond their local domain. Rather than approaching these poor villages (whose per capita incomes are as low as $300 per year) as foreign experts professing recommendations for economic development, the SUCCESS team regarded these coherent communities as exemplars of an increasingly rare, ancient way of life that could be built upon in attempting to forge future models of sustainable urban development for both the Chinese as well as the West.

Monday April 14

10:00- 11:00- Welcome-“Sustainability: China and the U.S. (Richard Levine)

11:00- 12:30- " SUCCESS: A Sustainable Future for Chinese Villages" (Heidi Dumreicher and Bettina Kolb)

Lunch Break

2:00- 3:30 -“New Sustainable Cities in China: A Critique ” (Ernest Yanarella)

7:00- Film in Worsham Theater, UK Student Center-
“Every Seventh Person” with introductory remarks & Question and Answer session led by Heidi Dumreicher and Richard Levine.
Reception follows

Tuesday April 15

9:30- 10:45- "Spaces of Communication and Interaction: A Chinese Example" (Heidi Dumreicher and Bettina Kolb)

11:00- 12:15 “From Disappearing Village to Sustainable Town,” (Richard Levine)

Lunch Break

2:00- 3:00-“The Chinese Village as a Sustainability Oriented Systems Model,” (Michael Hughes, Casey Mather)

3:00- 4:00- Concluding panel discussion

Photo Exhibition

A small exhibition, “ China 's Villages and their Sustainable Future,” will be displayed on the first floor of the student center, near the Worsham Theater, during the symposium. This exhibition has been displayed at the International Sustainable Development Conference in Hong Kong .

Speakers

	Heidi Dumreicher is the founder and chief executive officer of Oikodrom: The Vienna Institute for Urban Sustainability. Oikodrom was founded in the early 90s and has organized and implemented several sustainability projects in towns, cities and town-hinterland-partnerships. In her research-work, Dr. Dumreicher has specialised in integration-work to organise research between different disciplines, including arts and non-scientific partners. She has been developing innovative sociological methods that consider data-collection not as mere ethnical procedure, but as part of a participation- and empowerment-processes. She is also working on a theoretical background for the generation of knowledge. She has presented the results of her sustainability-research at numerous national and international conferences.
	Michael Hughes is a graduate of UK's Architecture program in the College of Design. Currently he is Architectural Apprentice and Research Associate of the Center for Sustainable Cities Design Studio
	Richard Levine is a Director of the Center for Sustainable Cities at UK and Professor of Architecture at UK. He is one of the Solar Architecture pioneers and was the founding Chair of the Sustainability Division of the American Solar Energy Society.
	Casey Mather is a graduate of UK's Architecture program in the College of Design. Currently he is Architectural Apprentice and Research Associate of the Center for Sustainable Cities Design Studio.
	Ernest Yanarella is Professor of Political Science and a Director of the Center for Sustainable Cities at UK His primary teaching and research interests are in the areas of critical policy studies (energy and environment, agricultural and ecological policy, and national security and arms control), political theory (early, modern, and critical traditions), public ethics, and politics and literature.

Directions

Driving directions to UK and the visitor's parking garage.
Here is a map from the parking garage to Room 230 and the Worsham Theater in the student center. (pdf)